NASCUS' Fortney Gives Presentation at World Credit Union Conference

August 1, 2014 – NASCUS President and CEO Mary Martha Fortney presented on anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) compliance responsibilities, and fine tuning risk-based approaches at the 2014 World Credit Union Conference held this week in Australia.

During her presentation, Fortney noted, “I think that as with cyber security and fraud…we have arrived at a place where increasing emphasis has to be put into a proactive operational stance. The historic model was defensive posture where credit unions’ compliance model was to build as impenetrable a wall as possible to keep out the bad actors. Now, I think credit unions must think about a compliance program that looks out beyond their walls and seeks to identify the bad actors before they ever reach the gates, as it were.”

Fortney suggested larger credit unions leverage their AML CIP/CDD apparatus for due-diligence on business partners and vendors as part of an enterprise-wide risk mitigation/security platform.

“If indeed we are migrating to a more proactive AML/security apparatus, then the question becomes how is that integrated and organized from an operational perspective,” Fortney offered. “Broadly speaking, credit unions could choose to separate these functions into a silo structure where each compliance program, security, fraud, AML/CFT perform their own functions, or a credit union could choose to integrate all of those functions into a consolidated security function.”

The World Credit Union Conference is held annually by the World Council of Credit Unions, an international organization made up of credit unions and cooperative banking organizations. This year’s conference was co-hosted by the World Council & Customer Owned Banking Association (COBA), Australia’s peak body for credit unions, building societies and mutual banks. AM Institute supported the conference program in collaboration with COBA.